Honoring your writer self Part 2

A couple of posts ago, I listed Judy Reeves' ideas about honoring your self as a writer. At my Second Thursday writing group, I handed the list out and asked each person to write for a few minutes on one of the ideas. I started off writing on one and digressed and came back.

Make a comfortable place for your writing. Since I live alone and work here too, it would seem easy to turn my whole spacious apartment into a writing and art studio and I don't know why I never thought of this before. In 2000, I did a project called Zen Home and renovated the interior (new colors, new furniture arrangements, fixing what didn't work) so that my place could more easily support the kind of life I wanted. Now I think it may be time to do that again as what I'm up to has changed.

In 2000, I didn't see myself as a writer and artist. I hadn't started my memoir, I was not doing collage at all. I was just taking an occasional drawing class. Now my whole concept of my self has changed and perhaps my apartment needs to too.

I'm not sure what changes to make but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Here are some of my ideas:

• Get some kind of a light over the dining table for better illumination.
• Really reduce the clutter in the office, like no kidding.
• Get some kind of cart for creative supplies or use the lower shelves of the living rooms bookcase (hidden from public view by the sofa) for such supplies so they are handier
• Make better use of the office storage.

How might you set things up to support your creative endeavors?

Feeling stymied

My novel is in a transitional place. I've come to a big break in one of the main stories and am in the bridge to the second. This wasn't quite how I imagined the novel occurring but it has taken its own direction and I'm going along. I need to sort out some of what happens next but my current struggle with a viral condition called shingles is making that hard.

Usually, when I'm stymied, I'll spend an hour with my notebook creating possible scenarios and twists and turns for the characters. Since they're at X, what's one of 20 logical Ys? Then I'll contemplate those for a while and the right one will make itself known.

But shingles involves a lot of pain, both the nagging, aching kind that sits in the background but is never very far away and the sudden truly miserable kind that shouts PAY ATTENTION TO ME! Last night when I was awake every hour or so, I tried to shift to Ellie's dilemma and what might happen next and I just didn't have the presence of mind to focus. That's frustrating to me for it's been more than a week since I wrote anything and that makes me nearly as restless as the pain.

Honor yourself as a writer

1. Name yourself writer.

2. Make a comfortable place for your writing.

3. Get the best equipment and accoutrements you can afford.

4. Make time for study and practice.

5. Schedule time with other writers.

6. Read your writing to others.

7. Print out computer documents.

8. Submit material for publication.

9. Celebrate when you’ve completed a section or work inprogress.

10. Accept compliments gracefully.

Adapted from A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

I submitted a book review for the Oregon Writers Colony newsletter today and thought I'd share it with you.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print

By Renni Browne and Dave King (Second edition/soft cover, 280 pp., 2004, HarperCollins)
ISBN: 978-0-06-054569-7
Review by Jill Kelly, PhD

As a 15-year veteran of freelance editing and writing coaching, I’m always on the lookout for books that will help my clients both write better and self-edit better. Most of the people I work with aren’t wealthy and the services of a good editor aren’t cheap, so the more they can do themselves, the happier they are.

Browne and King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is a book I consistently recommend. Here’s why:

• The writing is clear and helpful. It’s more like a conversation with knowledgeable friends on a subject you both love: good writing. There’s nothing didactic about it, none of that pompous “I know and you don’t” style that often appears in writing manuals, especially those by academics.

• The topics and examples are helpful for writers at all levels. Whether you’re working on the fourth book in a published series or figuring out how to self-edit for the first time, the ideas here can help you improve your writing. I learn something every time I read it.

• The book is thorough. It covers all the main skills of fiction writing and how to improve them. I especially like their chapters on interior monologue and using physical beats to distinguish speakers. When you combine that thoroughness with the thoughtful and provocative nature of the exercises and the extensive answers in the back, the book becomes a mini-course in good writing.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers does assume a solid knowledge of basic grammar, parts of speech, and standard punctuation, so it will not cure your comma errors or dangling participles. But again the tone is kind and clear, and writing terms like dialog, analogy, point of view, etc. get explained in context. And while this book is aimed at fiction writers, much of the information and the exercises will prove useful to those writing prose poems, memoir, and non-fiction. So while it isn’t a substitute for hands-on work with a good developmental or text editor, it can take you a long way.

the point of a scene

I spent the day writing a transition chapter. I need to move my heroine from Pittsburgh to New Mexico but I decided she needs to stop and see her ex on the way. She hasn't quite hit bottom yet and I think he can be instrumental in getting her there. But I don't yet know how. That's the next chapter to write.

But this chapter of travel, of road trip, needs to have its purpose too. While there's the possibility of using an occasional brief scene or chapter for glue, just to paste some things together, I'd rather not do that. So when I sat down to write the road trip, I felt a little stymied. It wouldn't take many sentences to have her drive to from southern Pennsylvania to Houston. In fact, I accomplished most of that in about 6 sentences and still said something about her state of mind.  But that wasn't enough.

So I thought about other things I could convey that would contribute to the plot or character development. Her distrust of men. Her fear of the killer. Her desire to stop being in fear. Her sorrow at leaving her best friend behind when that friend might also be a prey. Somehow I needed to convey all of this too. I wrote a draft of a chapter in which she thinks about some of these things but my challenge next time I write will be to see how I can create that through "show," not "tell." But at least I've identified what I want to communicate.

Pushing beyond what you know how to do

I'm getting ready to forward a difficult email to a friend who's a writer. I've many comments for his novel and I suspect he's not going to like what I have to say. In preparation, I was reading Leonard Bishop again: his brief commentary on "Completing Impossible Scenes." This little gem of advice is mislabeled for it's really about pushing ourselves as writers.

By the time most of us start writing, especially those of us who come to the craft at midlife or later, we have already absorbed many writing techniques through all the reading we've done. But that doesn't mean there isn't an infinite amount to learn ahead of us. Bishop enourages us to write the scenes we don't know how to write, to keep pushing the idea or the character or the plot deeper, further. Of course, we risk writing something that doesn't work, but all artists have to do that, create junk that teaches us something.

Too many writers, he says, get pretty good and then rearrange what they already know how to do. That's the place I think that my friend has fallen into. He knows how to write clever sentences, and introspective first-person narration, but he hasn't pushed the plot into an original place. I'm hoping I'll find the right words to encourage him to do so.

Writing from limbo

On Friday, I wrote the final Pittsburgh chapter of the novel, which has two consecutive plots. I hadn't known it would be the last chapter. I was writing again from the imaginary seat of my pants and while I knew I was close to getting the protagonist out of town, it happened. It was good writing and a satisfying departure for her but now I'm a bit stymied.

Will Ellie go directly to New Mexico and encounter Al or will there be some adventures in-between? Will she hook up with Danny, an old boyfriend, in Houston? Will the killer be on her trail and will she have close calls? I don't know.

It's an opportunity for me to practice 16 solutions. What 16 things can happen to Ellie now that she's on the road?

I have a love-hate relationship with this kind of not knowing. I like ending a writing session with a clear idea of what to write next. It doesn't have to be the whole story splayed out in front of me but to know the next piece is comforting. But there's also some excitement in not knowing, in waiting for the muse to instruct me, the characters to speak to me.

I know that not everything is possible, that it isn't that wide open. I'm at 55,000 words and I've lots of loose ends in Story 2 to deal with so this part can't be more than 2-3 chapters. And those 55, 000 words and their events will circumscribe to some extent what's possible. But surely there's time for another big wrinkle in the adventure. I can't wait to find out.